Beginning Microsoft SQL Server 2008 ... - S3 Tech Training

Easy, right? Well, now the boss comes back and says, “Great — now I’ll just have Billy Bob write something
to turn this into XML — too bad that will probably take a day or two.” This is your cue to step in
and say, “Oh, why didn’t you say so?” and simply add three key words:
USE AdventureWorks2008;
Chapter 16: A Brief XML Primer
SELECT Sales.Customer.CustomerID,
Sales.Customer.AccountNumber,
Sales.SalesOrderHeader.SalesOrderID,
CAST(Sales.SalesOrderHeader.OrderDate AS date) AS OrderDate
FROM Sales.Customer
JOIN Sales.SalesOrderHeader
ON Sales.Customer.CustomerID = Sales.SalesOrderHeader.CustomerID
WHERE Sales.Customer.CustomerID = 29890 OR Sales.Customer.CustomerID = 30067
FOR XML RAW;
You have just made the boss very happy. The output is a one-to-one match versus what we would have
seen in the result set had we run just a standard SQL query:
Be aware that Management Studio will truncate any column where the length exceeds the number set
in the Options menu in the Results to Text tab (maximum is 8192). This issue exists in the results window
(grid or text) and if you output directly to a file. This is an issue with the tool — not SQL Server
itself. If you use another method to retrieve results (ADO for example), you shouldn’t encounter an
issue with this.
We have one element in XML for each row of data our query produced. All column information, regardless
of what table was the source of the data, is represented as an attribute of the “row” element. The
downside of this is that we haven’t represented the true hierarchical nature of our data — orders are only
placed by customers. The upside, however, is that the XML DOM — if that’s the model you’re using — is
going to be much less deep and, hence, will have a slightly smaller footprint in memory and perform better,
depending on what you’re doing.
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